BRITISH ART SHOW 7:
In The Days of the Comet

23 October 2010 - 9 January 2011*

 

at New Art Exchange, Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Nottingham Contemporary

 

* Please note, the last day to view British Art Show at New Art Exchange is Saturday 8th January 2011

 

The British Art Show is widely recognised as the most ambitious and influential exhibition of contemporary British art.

 

Organised by Hayward Touring Exhibitions, it takes place every five years and tours to four different cities across the UK. Now in its seventh incarnation the British Art Show opens in Nottingham, and tours for the first time in 20 years to the Hayward Gallery, followed by venues in Glasgow and Plymouth. It is curated by Lisa Le Feuvre and Tom Morton.

 

The 39 selected artists have been chosen on the grounds of their significant contribution to contemporary art in the last five years. All artworks included have been produced since 2005 and encompass sculpture, painting, installation, drawing, photography, film, video and performance, with many artists creating new works especially for the exhibition. British Art Show 7 will mark a change in direction from previous years, moving away from the model of a survey show to an exhibition with a marked curatorial focus.

 

Subtitled In the Days of the Comet, British Art Show 7 employs the motif of the comet to explore and draw together a set of concerns that thread their way through the practices of the selected artists. Here the comet alludes to the measuring of time, to historical recurrence, and to parallel worlds. Comets are also commonly understood as harbingers of change, and fittingly the exhibition will evolve as it moves from city to city, revealing new works at different venues, creating a unique exhibition in each host city.

 

The artists in British Art Show 7 are:

 

Charles Avery

Karla Black

Becky Beasley

Juliette Blightman

Duncan Campbell

Varda Caivano

Spartacus Chetwynd

Steven Claydon

Cullinan Richards

Matthew Darbyshire

Milena Dragicevic

Luke Fowler

Michael Fullerton

Alasdair Gray

Brian Griffiths

Roger Hiorns

Ian Kiaer

Anja Kirschner & David Panos

Sarah Lucas

Christian Marclay

Simon Martin

Nathaniel Mellors

Haroon Mirza

David Noonan

The Otolith Group

Mick Peter

Gail Pickering

Olivia Plender

Elizabeth Price

Karin Ruggaber

Edgar Schmitz

Maaike Schoorel

George Shaw

Wolfgang Tillmans

Sue Tompkins

Phoebe Unwin

Tris Vonna-Michell

Emily Wardill

Keith Wilson

 

 

At New Art Exchange we are proud to host works by artists Christian Marclay, Duncan Campbell and Elizabeth Price.

 

 

Christian Marclay The Clock

 

 

Christian Marclay | The Clock, 2010

Single channel video | Duration: 24 hours | Courtesy White Cube

 

Christian Marclay is a New York based visual artist and composer whose innovative work explores the juxtaposition between sound recording, photography, video and film. Born in California and raised in Geneva (Switzerland), he studied sculpture at the Massachusettes College of Art in Boston and at Cooper Union in New York. As performer and iconic sound artist, Marclay has been experimenting, composing and performing with phonograph records and turntables since 1979 to create his unique "theater of found sound."

 

For three decades Marclay has deftly manipulated recorded sound and its associated imagery - from his early work as a pioneering turntablist to assemblages of record covers and montages of clips from Hollywood movies.

His new work, The Clock, features thousands of found film fragments of clocks, watches, and characters reacting to a particular time of day. These are edited together to create a 24 hour-long, single-channel video that is synchronised with local time. As each new clip appears a new narrative is suggested, only to be swiftly overtaken by another. Watching, we inhabit two worlds; that of fiction and that of fact, as real-time seconds fly inexorably by.

 

These clips from several thousand films, are structured so that the resulting artwork always conveys the correct time, minute by minute, in the time zone in which is it being exhibited. The scenes in which we see clocks or hear chimes tend to be either transitional ones suggesting the passage of time or suspenseful ones building up to dramatic action.

 

 

 

Duncan Campbell Bernadette

 

 

Duncan Campbell | Bernadette, 2008

Single screen standard definition video with stereo audio | Duration: 37 minutes, 10 seconds | Courtesy the artist and Hotel, London

 

Duncan Campbell’s works combine traditionally different styles of filmmaking.  Documentary portraits of complex historical figures, composed of archival footage and animation in cinéma vérité style, are integrated into more abstract scenes, influenced by avant-garde writers and artists. By combining them, Campbell intends to ‘allow this difference rather than homogenise it.’ Irish-born Campbell is interested in the seductive power of stories. With a nod to Samuel Beckett's humour, his work juxtaposes the inherent promise of storytelling with the breakdown of narrative and the inevitable disintegration of meaning.

 

Bernadette (2006) is Campbell’s study of the turbulent relationship between the Northern Irish political campaigner Bernadette Devlin and the media during the 1970s, disclosed through the contradictory press coverage of her as a martyr, victim, and troublemaker by broadcasters who championed and later targeted her. It presents an unravelling, open-ended story of the female Irish dissident and political activist, Bernadette Devlin.

 

Campbell is interested in fusing documentary and fiction in order to assess both the subject matter and the mode of communicating it. Campbell’s treatment of the author, subject, and audience relationship in the film, and its refusal to adhere to formal conventions: the cutting between archival material, animation, and scripted voiceover is ultimately for Campbell an attempt at reality, an attempt at truth.

 

Describing his work in a letter to Devlin, in which he announces his plans to make Bernadette, Campbell writes:
‘My film is a portrait of you. Now, of course I do not know you so it is my portrait of you: a public figure through whom the politics and history of a very particular time and place seemed to distill and through whom they seemed to pass. I have tried to capture some of the momentum and potential of Northern Ireland during the late 60s and early 70s and to chart your political becoming during this time.

 

Duncan Campbell lives and works in Glasgow, UK. He recently received the Paul Hamlyn Award, and the Baloise Art Prize 2008.

 

 

 

 

Elizabeth Price User Group Disco

 

 

Elizabeth Price | User Group Disco, 2009

High definition video, colour, sound | Duration: 15 minutes | Courtesy the artist and MOT International London

 

Elizabeth Price was born in Bradford, Yorkshire in 1966 and grew up in Luton Bedfordshire. In 2004 Price won the Jerwood Artists Platform Prize. Between 2004-6 she was Research Fellow in Fine Art at London Metropolitan University and in 2007 was awarded the Stanley Picker Fellowship at Kingston University.

 

User Group Disco is the second video in Elizabeth Price’s series New, Ruined Institute. Each episode takes place in a different room within a fictional institution, this time inside a museum’s Hall of Sculptures. Kitsch porcelain dolls, ebony records and disco balls rotate to the music of Aha, while text borrowed from corporate power-point presentations and literary and philosophical tracts materialises on screen.

 

There is just littered debris: defunct, damaged, unidentifiable things. There are also no people here - no apparent human action, and no visible architecture. The only things visible are the objects themselves - a debris comprised of mundane and ubiquitous objects, utensils and ornaments. And these things drift in a black void.

What ensues during the course of the video, is a series of reveries and hallucinations concerning these objects.

 

Price presents us with strange and miscellaneous objects to classify. ‘I don’t want my work to be seen as institutional critique, but perhaps one of its descendents. I’m interested in working with it not as a failed project but as an unfulfilled narrative.’

 

 

Edgar Schmitz To go with the Comet

 

Working on the ‘politics of confusion’, Edgar Schmitz is uneasy with the authority invested in the apparatus of an exhibition. He chooses to inhabit ‘threshold spaces’ in each of the three galleries in Nottingham, producing sound and video interventions to accompany the exhibition, while remaining ambiguously distanced from it.

 

The cinematic trailer is a cultural product that does not quite exist on its own terms but only in relation to the film it promotes. The energy and excitement of trailer music is isolated by Schmitz and filtered into venues’ peripheral spaces. Elsewhere, a montage of movie and television company idents flickers near a doorway into the gallery.

 
 
Throughout British Art Show 7: In The Days of the Comet, New Art Exchange have programmed a full range of interactive events and activities for the whole family. These include workshops, film screenings, artist talks and special performances. Click here to explore the programme, as we’re sure you’ll find something to interest you!


Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Hayward Gallery said: "The British Art Show has always been at the forefront of innovation, and this incarnation is no exception. The curatorial premise of the British Art Show 7 allows visitors the chance to discover younger artists, and also re-evaluate and reconnect with artists whose work they thought they were familiar with, but whose new developments hold many surprises.”

 

Curators Lisa Le Feuvre and Tom Morton said: "Our subtitle is taken from HG Wells’ 1906 science fiction novel In the Days of the Comet. The story charts the appearance of a comet over the United Kingdom that releases a green gas creating a ‘great change’ in all mankind, turning it away from war and exploitation towards rationalism and a heightened appreciation of beauty. We are interested in the recurrent nature of the comet as a symbol of how each version of the present collides with the past and the future and the work of the artists in British Art Show 7, in many different ways, contest assumptions of how ‘the now’ might be understood.”

 

 

VENUES AND DATES

 

NOTTINGHAM: New Art Exchange, Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Nottingham Contemporary, 23 October 2010 - 9 January 2011

LONDON: Hayward Gallery, 14 February - 1 May 2011 (tbc)

GLASGOW: Centre for Contemporary Art; Gallery of Modern Art; Tramway 28 May - 21 August 2011

PLYMOUTH: Peninsular Arts, Plymouth Arts Centre; Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery; Royal William Yard

17 September - 4 December 2011 (tbc)

 

 

British Art Show 7 Passport

 

Entry to British Art Show 7 at New Art Exchange and Nottingham Contemporary is free. The British Art Show Passport can be used every Tuesday to Saturday, so you can gain free entry to Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery, which gives you a saving of up to £15.00. You can find it on the back of the British Art Show 7 leaflet which is available at each venue, across the city and in the city centre tourist information centre. 

 

Simply collect the stamps from Reception at both New Art Exchange and Nottingham Contemporary first* and hand it to the Nottingham Castle admission gate upon entry.

 

Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery normal admission charges

 

 

British Art Show 7 links: Official website | Nottingham Events

 

Our partner venues: Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery | Nottingham Contemporary

 

During BAS7 p lease also check out: Sideshow | Experience Nottinghamshire